Breadcrumbs Highlight the Importance of a Good IA

At Acceleration Partners we’ve always placed a lot of emphasis on a good information architecture (IA) with a clear, easy-to-use navigation. Not only does it make it easier for users to make their way around your site (and toward the checkout) but it also makes it easier for Google to crawl your site.

Now there’s even more of a reason to make sure your information architecture makes sense. In mobile search snippets, Google has started replacing the URL with the site name and breadcrumb path.

Note the difference between these two sets of results. The image on the left features the old URLs and the image on the right features breadcrumbs instead.

Part of the reason Google is now favoring breadcrumbs is because they make for a better user experience. They immediately tell users what part of a site they are navigating to. This is also the reason why it makes sense to have clean, organized URLs that let the user know what the page is about and where it fits in the site.

For now, the change only impact mobile search results, but it’s possible in the future Google could roll it out to normal desktop results as well.

If you haven’t done so already, it might make sense to take some time and define what’s going to show up as your site name and as your breadcrumbs. You can use structured data markup on your site to indicate what name Google should display. You can also mark up bread crumb information the body of your web page to let Google know what should be displayed as breadcrumbs.

This is just another reminder why a logical structure is so important to your site. Read more about how to give your site an SEO renovation in our latest eBook or contact us to find out what we can do to help your site.